Artist Tina Stefanou explores agriculture and art in Western Australia - ABC News

By Alice Angeloni

ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt

Topic:Art

Tina Stephanou has paid homage to WA's wool and grain industries in her abstract artwork Back-Breeding. (Supplied: Wil Normyle/Tina Stefanou)

A massive piece of farming machinery dressed in a woollen suit is a rather unusual sight.

But the vision of visual artist and vocalist Tina Stefanou and the residents of a tiny town in Western Australia's Midwest has brought this bizarre concept to life.

They spent nine days sewing the costume – made from raw wool donated from farms in the area – for the the 1986 John Deere tractor.

Film stills from Back-Breeding. (Supplied: Wil Normyle/Tina Stefanou)

"We dressed up the tractor and we created a performance work in the middle of a canola field, where the community was invited to actually witness this performance with a group of vocalists that I'd been working with, which consisted of children and women," Stefanou said.

"And we pull this giant sculptural work through the field — it's quite a surreal piece."

The abstract work was filmed. (Supplied: Wil Normyle/Tina Stefanou)

The abstract work was filmed over three days on a dead canola crop in stifling heat.

The community was invited to attend the final scene.

"They got to witness Jackson the horse and Jess the rider ride off into the sunset with the woolly tractor as a cheeky homage to the Western," Stefanou said.

Stefanou worked hard to earn the trust of the community. (Supplied: Tina Stefanou)

She had not heard of Carnamah, an inland town about 300 kilometres north of Perth, before spending about four months there during an artist-in-residence last year.

The small farming town, thousands of kilometres from Stefanou's home in Wattle Glen, Melbourne, offered ideal ground to explore how agribusiness intersects with the arts.

Stefanou said she was grounded by an idea from theorist Roland Barthes — "The Grain of the Voice".

The costume took nine days to create. (Supplied: Tina Stefanou)

"[It] talks about the individuality of a person's being that's contained within the sound of their voice, the textures of their voice," she said.

"'The Grain of the Voice' is something that I've been carrying with me as I explored the voice of grain or the voices around grain."

Large-scale cropping and sheep farming is the backbone of many towns in WA.

Carnamah will soon be home to Australia's newest Big Thing — an 11.5-metre high tractor — five times the scale of the vintage Chamberlain it's based on.

Tina Stefanou has been awarded the 68th Blake Prize in the emerging artist category. (Supplied: Wil Normyle/Tina Stefanou)

Stefanou said she arrived in Carnamah as an outsider, prompting the question of how to create trust.

"How do I earn the right to ask to collaborate?" she said.

The answer was to spend as much time with the community as possible, so Stefanou started running vocal workshops.

Stefanou is using abstract art to explore some unlikely connections. (Supplied: Wil Normyle/Tina Stefanou)

"I just came every week to the same space and then people would come and sit with me and we would hum and we would explore the voice through lots of different experimental methods," she said.

At the same time, she was travelling around the region meeting shearers.

Stefanou, who was engaged in creative research for her PHD, was coming to understand better the legacy of sheep and grain in the region.

She was also becoming familiar with the questions and challenges facing these communities amid major environmental, climatic and technological changes.

Stefanou wanted to experiment with the Carnamah community in a way that spoke to them.

The ride into the sunset was a homage to Western films. (Supplied: Wil Normyle/Tina Stefanou)

So it was a large-scale sewing project, combining wool, a tractor and vocalists.

"It was a great opportunity to think about how creative practice and how arts can imaginatively abstractly work with agricultural resources," she said.

Stefanou's film work, Back-Breeding has been awarded the 68th Blake Prize in the emerging artist category.

Her work has fed into her PhD, which is titled Voice in the Expanded Field and she has aspirations to continue following the voices of grain over the coming years.

Stefanou hopes to continue her creative research by following the journey of Australian grain on ships to communities where it's processed overseas.